Life with Big Brother

[American_Jihad]

5 Things To Know About The NSA's Surveillance Activities​

by Krishnadev Calamur
October 23, 2013

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What does the NSA monitor?

— Metadata, which includes the records of several billion telephone calls made in the U.S. each day. The NSA does listen to the content of some of those phone calls. It also monitors the online and phone calls of foreign citizens.

— Emails, instant messages and Facebook posts, as well as contact lists and raw Internet traffic. Tech companies have denied giving the agency direct access to their servers, but the NSA paid them millions of dollars to cover the cost of complying with its requests.
Is the activity legal?

Yes — at least the phone spying is, according to a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

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How are the operations justified?

National security. As NPR's Eyder Peralta noted last week, the NSA and the CIA collaborate on drone attacks against suspected terrorists.

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Can you protect your data?

Short answer: It's unlikely.

As Eyder reported over at the Two-Way blog last month, documents leaked by Snowden revealed that the NSA has the keys to crack most Internet encryption methods.

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Why are people overseas angry?

There's no court that oversees the NSA's activities on foreign communications. The leaks have indicated that the agency not only spied on countries such as Iran, but also allies like France, Brazil, Mexico — and even U.N. diplomats.

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5 Things To Know About The NSA's Surveillance Activities : Parallels : NPR

 

[American_Jihad]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIA1lQBqH1s]Maxine Waters Confirms "Big Brother" Database 2013 - YouTube[/ame]

 

[American_Jihad]

Report: NSA tracks billions of cellphones daily


Kimberly Dozier, The Associated Press Facebook
7 hours ago

The National Security Agency tracks the locations of nearly 5 billion cellphones every day overseas, including those belonging to Americans abroad, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The NSA inadvertently gathers the location records of "tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad" annually, along with the billions of other records it collects by tapping into worldwide mobile network cables, the newspaper said in a report on its website.

Such data means the NSA can track the movements of almost any cellphone around the world, and map the relationships of the cellphone user. The Post said a powerful analytic computer program called CO-TRAVELER crunches the data of billions of unsuspecting people, building patterns of relationships between them by where their phones go. That can reveal a previously unknown terrorist suspect, in guilt by cellphone-location association, for instance.

As the NSA doesn't know which part of the data it might need, the agency keeps up to 27 terabytes, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress' print collection, the Post said. A 2012 internal NSA document said the volumes of data from the location program were "outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store" it, the newspaper said.

The program is detailed in documents given to the newspaper by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden. The Post also quotes unidentified NSA officials, saying they spoke with the permission of their agency.

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Report: NSA tracks billions of cellphones daily - NBC News.com

 

[American_Jihad]

The Future of Whistleblowing? No Constitutional Rights

"Your First Amendment rights are criminalized in this country if you expose, especially, national security related matters." ​

12.29.2013 |Trey Sanchez

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUUmfRpgL-w]The Future of Whistleblowing? No Constitutional Rights - YouTube[/ame]

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“Whistle-blowing now is extraordinarily dangerous. It ends up, your First Amendment rights are criminalized in this country if you expose, especially, national security related matters. That somehow the imprimatur of national security trumps the Constitution - it trumps the rule of law and it trumps what I believe most Americans would believe is reasonable expectation of privacy. Even Justice Sotomayor in 2012, in her opinion, said that we have to revisit this expectation of no privacy simply because we provide data to a third party.

The Future of Whistleblowing? No Constitutional Rights | Truth Revolt

 

[American_Jihad]

CIA Accused of Spying on Senate Intel Committee, Breaking Law

By Kasie Hunt
March 11 2014

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that the CIA searched the panel's computers and that the search may have violated the Constitution.

"The CIA just went and searched the committee's computers," California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in a lengthy speech on the Senate floor, calling the the matter a "defining moment" for the oversight of the Intelligence Committee.

"I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied by the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause,” she said. "It may have undermined the Constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activity or any other government function."

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CIA Accused of Spying on Senate Intel Committee, Breaking Law - NBC News

 

[American_Jihad]

WikiLeaks will give tech firms access to CIA hacking tools: Assange
John Bacon , USA TODAY
Published 10:12 a.m. ET March 9, 2017

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his group will work with technology companies to help defend them against the Central Intelligence Agency's hacking tools Time

WikiLeaks will allow tech companies access to much more detailed information about CIA hacking techniques so they can "develop fixes" before the information is widely published, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Thursday.

Assange spoke two days after WikiLeaks published thousands of documents it said revealed hacking tools the CIA developed to break into servers, smartphones, computers and TVs. The news conference took place at the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where Assange has been holed up since seeking asylum in 2012.

"The Central Intelligence Agency lost control of its entire cyberweapons arsenal," Assange said. "This is an historic act of devastating incompetence to have created such an arsenal and stored it all in one place and not secured it."

Assange said that some tech firms have reached out seeking more details about the CIA tools. He said WikiLeaks hasn't published the details because it doesn't want "journalists and people of the world, our sources, being hacked using these weapons." The best way to avoid that, he said, is to give companies such as Apple, Google and Samsung access first.

"We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out," Assange said.

Apple, Google, Microsoft in crosshairs of WikiLeaks allegations


Confused by all those Wikileaks hacking terms? Here's a glossary


Some tech giants, Google and Apple among them, said many of the apparent vulnerabilities exposed in the documents have already been patched. Most firms said they are continuing to evaluate the information.

WikiLeaks claims the CIA and its Center for Cyber Intelligence lost its restricted access to several hundred million lines of crucial hacking code. WikiLeaks says the archive appears to have circulated among former government hackers and contractors, one of whom provided the website with portions of it.

WikiLeaks says the CIA hacking division involved "more than 5,000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other 'weaponized' malware."

The FBI launched a criminal investigation into the release of the document cache, a U.S. official told USA TODAY this week. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly, said the inquiry will determine whether the disclosure represented a breach from the outside or a leak from inside the spy agency. A separate review will attempt to assess the damage caused by such the disclosure, the official said.

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WikiLeaks will give tech firms access to CIA hacking tools: Assange


With Claims of C.I.A.
Hacking, How to
Protect Your Devices
Want to protect against surveillance
through your iPhones, Android
devices, Wi-Fi routers and Samsung
televisions? Update, update, update.

Tech Fix

By BRIAN X. CHEN MARCH 8, 2017

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/technology/personaltech/defense-against-cia-hacking.html